The 58-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology graudate and former banker dogged by corruption allegations long stood in the vanguard of opponents to Saddam Hussein, and enjoys the patronage of an influential circle of US neo-conservatives.

In May, an official from the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), the Pentagon-run entity helping to oversee Iraq's reconstruction, conceded: "Many dislike him. But at the same time, they cannot come up with any other name."

His pedigree, as a pro-western and secular Shiite, has kept him a contender in the post-Saddam era.

Chalabi, who was flown into the country in April by the Pentagon with his since-disbanded militia, the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF), has struggled to make the case that he is his own man.

He is considered dubious in particular for his long absence from the country since his family fled Iraq with the 1958 fall of the monarchy when he was only 13.

In a bid to demonstrate his authenticity to Iraqis, he has clashed with the US-led adminstration on two occasions since his return. His group loudly criticised the initial US decision to allow top officials of Saddam's Baath party to serve in government.

US overseer Paul Bremer later reversed the decision, but Chalabi was less successful in protesting Bremer's scrapping in June of plans for a national conference that was to select the transtional government, as well as his move to sideline a council of former opposition parties which the US administration had been consulting about the country's future.

The INC has undertaken a campaign to clear Chalabi's past in Jordan, where he was sentenced to 22 years hard labour in 1992 after being tried in absentia over the disappearance of 60 million dollars from the Petra Bank, which he set up in 1977 and which crashed in 1989.

Chalabi says the conviction was politically motivated under pressure from Saddam's regime.

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